Do not want to miss a deadline? Here is ‘how’.

How often we are required to complete a task on time? Always! But what happens when we commit an impossible? Non adherence to time schedule are responsible for repeated loss to business. Service operations mainly focuses on utilizing time in the best way we can, or else, feel the heat. Time and money are always intertwined because nobody gets paid until somebody delivers the goods. That goes for you and the customer too! Deadlines trip up our business now and always!

The surprising reason why many of us fail to manage time, is that we only think we’re managing time. But the truth is, we usually manage people, or tasks, or both.

This is what most managers do: They make a list of tasks, then ask employees to assess how long each task will take them. Then, they set the due dates based on those evaluations.

It seems to make perfect sense. In theory. In reality, assessments are inaccurate at best. When people try to estimate how long a task will take them, they forget to take into account all the things that will go wrong. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s impossible to predict all the things that will go wrong, from servers down time to people catching the flu.

Here’s how you should manage time

1. Start working on sub steps.

There is no plain formula to calculate how much time will it take you to complete a project. However, if you carefully break each of your activity into smaller steps, you can have an idea of total time it may take. Work on it to reduce the timelines for each of those activities.

At the end of every project, make sure you assess the accuracy of your initial forecast to improve future quotes. In time, you’ll get very good at it.

2. Never move the deadline for sub steps

If you move the deadline each time there’s a setback, that means you’re not meeting the deadline. If worst comes to worst, remove a task. But never push the deadline.

3. Developing Aggressive Internal Schedule

Things will go wrong. They always do. And when they do, you don’t want it to impact the schedule you committed to, which you’ve hopefully had the foresight to pad as much as possible.

4. Always Know where you are

Knowing where you are is always beneficial. Both for you, your company and your customer. Once you have defined milestones, make you others are impacted as little as possible. Design...design and design. Design your project flow in such a way that each milestone is separate.

5. Use the time-oriented focus

Help the team gain focus, double everyone’s efforts, and prioritize. This means they can’t let anything distract them. If a task is not helping someone meet the deadline, they should drop it. And if after focusing and pushing harder you still can’t make the deadline, then prioritize. This means, remove less important tasks.

6. Ask correct questions

Milestones are defined and in order to achieve it, you work day and night. When customers tell you to jump, your initial reaction will always be to say, “How high?” You need to resist that urge and learn to ask questions and find out as much as you can before providing any answers. Sometimes you have to do a little digging but that’s how you build buffers into your schedule without risking the business or your credibility.

7. Communication clearly with customer

While you need to know how well you’re tracking to your forecast, it’s equally important to be smart about what you tell customers. Never communicate more than you have to. Remember, not every schedule slip or milestone miss is critical and it may do far more harm than good to share too much information.

Are you a team manager? What do you do to meet deadlines?